{"id":1246,"date":"2011-02-20T02:55:54","date_gmt":"2011-02-20T09:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/?p=1246"},"modified":"2011-02-20T02:55:54","modified_gmt":"2011-02-20T09:55:54","slug":"christopher-norris-defends-philosophy","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/2011\/02\/20\/christopher-norris-defends-philosophy\/","title":{"rendered":"Christopher Norris Defends Philosophy"},"content":{"rendered":"

Christopher Norris has written an article in Philosophy Now<\/a> defending the Philosophy of Science from allegations of its irrelevance by scientists (most recently Stephen Hawking for example). \u00a0Norris alleges the existence of “scientists\u2019 need to philosophize and their proneness to philosophize badly or commit certain avoidable errors if they don\u2019t take at least some passing interest in what philosophers have to say<\/span>“, and he asserts that modern theorists \u00a0“appear unworried \u2013 blithely unfazed, one is tempted to say \u2013 by the fact that their theories are incapable of proof or confirmation, or indeed of falsification…<\/span>” \u00a0and further that “scientific theories \u2013 especially theories of the ultra-speculative kind that preoccupy theoretical physicists like Hawking \u2013 involve a great deal of covert philosophising which may or may not turn out to promote the interests of knowledge and truth<\/span>“. All of these claims might be considered plausible on the basis of attempts to “explain” quantum physics (and beyond) in popular literature, where analogies (which often really are used by physicists, but just to help guide their intuition) are often all that is provided. \u00a0 It is true that some of these accounts can be faulted for not admitting that that is what they are doing, and perhaps that needs pointing out. But Norris seems to be doing the opposite by confusing the intuition-guiding analogies with the theories themselves.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Christopher Norris has written an article in Philosophy Now defending the Philosophy of Science from allegations of its irrelevance by scientists (most recently Stephen Hawking for example). \u00a0Norris alleges the existence of “scientists\u2019 need to philosophize and their proneness to … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23,17],"tags":[196,69],"class_list":["post-1246","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-physics","category-science","tag-philosophy","tag-quantum-mechanics"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1246","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1246"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1246\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1247,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1246\/revisions\/1247"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1246"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1246"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/qpr.ca\/blogs\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1246"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}